I got into the passenger seat of the gray Lexus, with the wooden spoon of my grandmother in my purse and the smell of fryer oil still in my hair, and the man behind the wheel handed me a business card. It read Lucien Thibodeaux, Agent, Louisiana Office of Alcohol and Tobacco Control. I am Odile Broussard, seventy one years old, and I held that card under the dome light as steady as I used to hold a recipe. “Mrs. Broussard,” he said, “your restaurant holds a liquor license in your name. Somebody has been selling what comes through that license, by the case, out of your back door.”
He opened a folder on his knee. In six months, Broussard had purchased forty one thousand dollars of premium liquor, and sold a fraction at the bar. The rest had left by the alley on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, loaded into the trunk of a gray Lexus by Brittany, and delivered to a tavern owner in Metairie who paid cash. The invoices that covered the missing bottles carried a signature, over and over. Remy Broussard. “Your son did not sign these,” the agent said gently. “But someone forged his name so well that I am not certain he knows.”
I thought of my son in the front of the house, in his pressed shirt, trusting a pretty wife. I thought of Alcide, who had never once let a delivery come through the door without counting it. I took the wooden spoon from my purse and held it in both hands. “Agent Thibodeaux,” I said, “I write everything down. Every delivery, every missing case, every night. I have six months of pocket notebooks in my locker. I did not know why I wrote them. Now I do.” He smiled for the first time.
A wooden spoon taken from a restaurant crock gave one retired cook the length of a ride in a gray Lexus to bring her son back to the truth in New Orleans.
I gave my terms Saturday morning, in the dining room of Broussard, before the lunch crowd, at table twelve, with two agents in plain clothes at the bar and my notebooks laid out on the white cloth. “Remy, Brittany, sit. I am not going to fight with you. I am going to tell you what I know, and you are going to tell me what you know, and then these gentlemen will decide what comes next. I would like my kitchen back, and I would like my son to understand that his mother was never losing a step.”
Remy sat with his hands on the cloth, white as the linen. “Mama, I signed what Brittany put in front of me,” he said, in a small voice. “She said it was routine, for the accountant. I did not read it. I did not want to know.” He looked at his wife. Brittany, in a cream blazer, folded her arms and said nothing. Then her shoulders sagged. “My brother owes people in Houston,” she said, finally. “I needed money fast. I thought you would never notice, Odile. You were always so busy with the pots.”
But the mention of the agents made Brittany desperate. She suddenly swept the accounting ledger and the second set of books from the table, spun around, and ran through the swinging doors into the kitchen, meaning to cross to the alley door and her car. She flew past the stainless counters. Clarence, the dishwasher, stepped into the narrow aisle with a stockpot in his hands. The young chef from Dallas, pale, set down his knife. And eight cooks in white jackets closed ranks in front of the back door.
Brittany stopped in the middle of the kitchen with the ledgers hugged to her chest and the heat of the burners on her face, the cooks silent in a half circle, steam rising from a hundred pots behind them. Clarence spoke in his slow, rich voice. “Miss Brittany, I have worked for Miss Odile for twenty two years. She has never once taken a thing that was not hers. Put those books down.” Brittany looked at the pot, at the faces. Her knees buckled. She laid the ledgers on the steel counter and covered her face, and out in the dining room the first lunch guests tapped on the glass.
The consequences were serious and orderly. Brittany and her brother were charged with liquor theft and forgery, and the tavern owner in Metairie was fined and lost his license. Because of my notebooks, the charges against Remy were dropped, and he spent a week sitting in my kitchen peeling shrimp in silence. The consultant from Austin was let go. The young chef from Dallas stayed, and learned my gumbo the right way, standing on a milk crate beside me, one ladle at a time.
In the name of my husband Alcide, who passed in 2018, I started the Alcide Broussard Fund. It pays for culinary scholarships for young cooks from struggling families and for legal and accounting help for family owned restaurants facing fraud, in Orleans, Jefferson and St. Tammany parishes. In the first year we sent thirty one young cooks to school and helped forty four restaurants recover from theft. One was a nineteen year old line cook from the Seventh Ward who made his first perfect roux in a school kitchen and wept over the pot.
On a hot Friday evening in June, the line outside Broussard on Magazine Street wound around the block and past the corner store, just as it had in 1987. I stood at my stove in a fresh white apron, stirring the stock with the wooden spoon of my grandmother, while Remy worked the front of the house in a pressed shirt, smiling at every guest. Clarence set down a steaming bowl at table one for a tourist from Ohio. The man tasted it, closed his eyes, and said it was worth the wait, and that he had traveled eleven hundred miles on the word of a magazine, and would do it again.